GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post

09-08-2003, 02:33 PM

In article ,
(Jan Flora) wrote:

In article , tomj wrote:

On Mon, 04 Aug 2003 20:02:26 -0800, (Jan Flora)
wrote:

I'm not trying to convince you to eat beef; just trying to let you know
that
we aren't all heartless corporate slash & burn, overgrazing, phone book,
dead
chicken & sheep "by-product" feeding monsters. (Yes, they feed old
phone books
to cattle now. Isn't that special? =:-O Ruminants can digest cellulose,
but you
won't catch me feeding cardboard or phone books...)

Not a chance in the world I'd be a part of eating anything killed for
food. I do accept my decision as a personal choice and have
appreciated your "style" and grace for providing a kinder gentler
alternative.

Thanks for all the input.

namaste,
tomj

I respect your decision to not eat meat. In America, that's a conscious
choice that takes some courage, as I'm sure people give you a hard time
about it sometimes. In too much of the world, folks eat anything that's
moving slower than they are. Americans have *no idea* how fortunate
they are to have the choice of what to eat, unless they've travelled or
worked in the 3rd world.

The part I left out of my whole narrative is that I refuse to work killing
our steers. I did it once, when the SO was out of town and a guy was getting
married. He was Russian. He prayed, shot the animal, prayed, bled the
animal, I swung the steer onto clean grass with the front end loader and
left. Came back an hour later, weighed the quarters of beef and took
the money. I _hate_ the smell of blood and _hate_ to see my animals die.
At least my Russian neighbors know that God is watching, so they treat
the animals with respect and say the proper prayers as they go.

I'll help the cows be born, nurse them when they're sick, stay up all night
in a blizzard tending them, feed them in blizzards or bitter cold, track them
through the woods when they decide to calve out where God lost her shoes,
put up with raging hay fever while I'm putting up the hay it takes to feed
them all winter, ride unbroke horses to drive them down to the grazing
lease and back home again, chop holes in the creek ice all winter so they
have water, fix *miles* of fence to keep them out of mischief, but I
*will not* be a party to killing them. I've been here nine years and still
won't help butcher. I'll do every stinking, rotton, unthankful job there is
on this ranch, but I will not kill the steers. (But I'll kill one who's
dying.)

That said, I have to kill my old saddle horse pretty soon, as she's crippled
with navicular syndrome (her front feet are shot and it's painful). It's
time.
I can do that. I'll be doing Red a kindness to kill her. I shot my 14 y/o dog
last summer. It was time. She was suffering. I see no reason to pay someone
to do that for me. It doesn't make it any easier.

I grew up in San Francisco, where water comes out of the faucet and meat
comes in little packages from Safeway. I'm not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

I'm just grateful to have landed with people who do this stuff right.

Jan

An utterly fascinating account that jumps off the page and right into
the hearts of us tenderfeet. Thanks for sharing that.

Phae